The Anti-Renter Regime in American Housing Policy

• In Event: U.S. Public Policy

Abstract

At the outset of the twentieth century, the United States had effectively no central housing policy. My mid-century, the country had a full housing policy system. That system generally excludes renters and entrenches inequalities between renters and owners. In this paper, I use historical-institutionalist methods to explain how renters were excluded from state-provided housing benefits during policy developments in 1916–1954, with enduring consequences for renters today. I begin by introducing the concept of an “anti-renter regime” to conceptualize the durable alignment of ideas, interests, and institutions that privileges homeowners and developers at the expense of renters. My historical analysis then tracks the generative events and reproductive mechanisms that formed this durable policy regime. I show how key decisions made by Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department in the 1920s and New Deal Democrats after WWII created path-dependent processes that favored the nascent real-estate industry and reproduced anti-renter ideas, and how an alternative pathway was foreclosed when a proposal for a more transformative public housing proposal failed in the 1930s. These developments created a durable policy regime that denies material and symbolic housing benefits to renters and creates barriers to renters’ political identification and group formation.

Author

• Shai Karp, Ursinus College